Icons really only work under limited circumstances. Among them, when the things being symbolized are few in number, and are themselves organizable into a small number of classes. Maya sometimes seems as if its design manual starts with "iconify... all the things!" with little regard for the classification system as a whole.
Good, universally-intelligible icons are very very hard to design (I certainly wouldn't try to do it -- I don't have the skills). Maya's icons are a bit of a mishmash, reflecting holdovers from the A/W interface as well as various trends and whims of designers and (probably) committees and executives over a long period of time. In particular, and Maya is hardly alone in this, much of the icon set is as others have noted, arbitrary, complex, and ambiguous. I think much of this stems from some very unfortunate design impulses in the early days of Maya. There is a childishness to many of the icons, as there is in calling things by obfuscatory, "cool" names like Hypershade or Playblast. I'm sure the intentions behind these early decisions were good, but man does it make people sound like a bunch of 14-year-old Marvel Comics fanboys when they're trying to have a serious technical conversation. Part of my dislike of this is just personal taste. But I think these things actually reveal some important truths about the design philosophy or philosophies that have resulted in the Maya interface and workflow. In particular, there is a feeling that much of it, especially the UI, was designed by well-meaning, talented amateurs. Kids, if you will. And this isn't surprising -- this is a young industry, and those decisions were made when we were all young(er) and inexperienced, with less-developed sensibilities. But nearly 20 years have gone by, and just as even Microsoft has begun to realize that appearance counts, we as individuals and as an industry have grown more sophisticated and have higher expectations for usability and design. The Sumatra/DS/XSI/Softimage interface went through a pretty questionable stage if I recall -- those buttons without edges, meant to look like bumps under a membrane, a really elegant but completely unintelligible icon set, and other things. But somehow, and I'm sure someone on the list could explain just how and when, things got pulled back and streamlined into a more functional, utilitarian design. I don't know who runs UI/functionality/experience design at AD, or in the M&E division, and I probably wouldn't be qualified to comment on their abilities if I did know. But I would like to ask that a complete, systematic, professional and user-focused reconsideration of Maya's UI be part of any effort to move the product forward.
